Distancing #2: Home Acres

This one’s easy: mid-afternoon at a pool and restaurant-bar in Siem Reap. I assume it was a hotel too, one of those French colonial jobs, but the pool was all we cared about. It was a hot and listless day that hadn’t yet had one of the sudden nonchalant downpours that come and go during that season. I say “that season” as though I spent more than a week there, but I spent exactly a week there, and was sullen and distant the whole time. Chris and Anya were putting me up and squiring me around the local expat scene, which felt empty and bloated at once. I mean no particular disrespect to any of the people I met there, who all seemed to mean well and not care about me but in a cheerful way. The rot seemed bigger than all of them, deeper down and since longer ago. We spent our evenings and then our late nights in bars and pubs and watering holes that didn’t even try to pretend to be trying to be authentic; I recognize a certain bracing honesty to this, looking back, but at the time I was unmoved, humorless. I was homesick, probably. I’d been traveling for two weeks out of five and I missed Kristina, Turtle, my real life. The local weed tasted like lentils. Everywhere we went we found burly Australians lecturing other burly Australians, Tool playing on the stereo, sunburned hedonists wearing elephant-patterned harem pants. I was about to turn thirty, and felt ragingly too old for all of it.

That day, my fourth or fifth, Chris took me on his scooter to go check out this pool. We still hadn’t found the easy rapport we’d shared since we were fourteen, but the tension had broken, like the heat after one of those storms, or we’d figured out how to ignore it. Going places during the day seemed to help, so here we were. We sat at the restaurant-bar for a spell—cocktail or fruit juice or afternoon brunch I no longer remember, but I feel very sure we spent seven American dollars total, an extravagance—and then repaired to the pool, where we idly splashed around for an hour or two. It was empty but for us and some pool noodles and two or three big green floaties that looked like the Kate Beaton pony but with antlers; there was an artificial waterfall mounted to a low wall with two eagle-winged bas-relief deities jutting out. It was the kind of serene worldly splendor that I usually assume is secretly propped up on someone else’s exploitation and misery, but I was tired of being mad at everything so yes, fine, it was...